and the inevitable group of middle-aged, depressed-looking men eyeing them with a furtive lack of interest. The place wasn’t yet open but the door yielded to his push. There was no one in the small reception kiosk. He went down the narrow stairs with their scruffy red carpet and drew aside the curtain of beads which divided the restaurant from the passage.
It was much as he remembered it. The Cortez Club, like its owner, had an innate capacity for survival. It looked a little smarter although the afternoon light showed up the tawdriness of the pseudo-Spanish decorations and the grubbiness of the walls. The floor was cluttered with tables, many only large enough for one and all too closely packed for comfort. But then, the customers did not come to the Cortez Club for family dinner parties, nor were they primarily interested in the food.
At the far end of the restaurant there was a small stage furnished with only a single chair and a large cane screen. To the left of the stage was an upright piano, its top littered with manuscript paper. A thin young man in slacks and sweater was curved against the instrument picking out a tune with his left hand and jotting it down with his right. Despite the sprawling attitude, the air of casual boredom, he was completely absorbed. He glanced up briefly as Dalgliesh came in but returned immediately to his monotonous stabbing at the keys.
The only other person present was a West African who was pushing a broom in leisurely fashion around the floor. He said in a soft, low voice: “We’re not open yet, Sir. Service doesn’t begin until six-thirty.”
“I don’t want to be served, thank you. Is Mr. Luker in?”
“I’ll have to enquire, Sir.”
“Please do so. And I’d like to see Miss Coombs too.”
“I’ll have to enquire, Sir. I’m not sure that she’s here.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find that she’s here. Tell her please that Adam Dalgliesh would like to speak to her.”
The man disappeared. The pianist continued his improvisation without looking up, and Dalgliesh settled himself at the table just inside the door to pass the ten minutes which he judged Luker would feel it appropriate to keep him waiting. He spent the time thinking of the man upstairs.
Luker had said he would kill his partner and he had killed. He had said he wouldn’t hang for it and he didn’t hang. Since he could hardly have counted on Mr. Justice Brothwick’s co-operation, the prediction had shown either uncommon prescience or remarkable confidence in his own luck. Some of the stories which had grown around him since his trial were no doubt apocryphal but he was not the man to repudiate them. He was known and accepted by the professional criminal classes without being one of them. They gave him the reverent half-superstitious respect of men who know exactly how much it is reasonable to risk for one who in one irretrievable stride has stepped outside all the limits. There was an ambience of awe about any man who had come so close to that last dreadful walk. Dalgliesh was sometimes irritated to find that even the police weren’t immune to it. They found it hard to believe that Luker, who had killed so casually to satisfy a private grudge, could content himself with running a string of second-class nightclubs. Some more spectacular wickedness was expected of him than the manipulation of licensing laws or income tax returns and the selling of mildly erotic entertainment to his dreary expense account customers. But if he had other enterprises, nothing as yet was known of them. Perhaps there was nothing to know. Perhaps all he craved was this prosperous semi-respectability, the spurious reputation, the freedom of this no man’s land between two worlds.
It was exactly ten minutes before the coloured man returned to say that Luker would see him. Dalgliesh made his own way up the two flights to the large front room from which Luker chose to direct not only the Cortez but all his clubs. It was warm and airless, over-furnished and under-ventilated. There was a desk in the middle of the room, a couple of filing cabinets against one wall, an immense safe to the left of the gas fire and a sofa and three easy chairs grouped around a television set. In the corner was a small washstand basin. The room was obviously designed to serve both as an office and a sitting room and succeeded in being neither. There were three people present: Luker himself; Sid Martelli, his general factotum at the Cortez; and Lily Coombs. Sid, in his shirt sleeves, was heating himself a small saucepan of milk on a gas ring at the side of the fire. He was wearing his usual expression of resigned misery. Miss Coombs, already in her evening black, was squatting on a pouffe in front of the gas fire varnishing her nails. She raised a hand in salute and gave Dalgliesh a wide, unworried smile. Dalgliesh thought that the manuscript description of her, whomever had written it, fitted her well enough. He couldn’t personally detect the Russian aristocratic blood but this hardly surprised him since he knew perfectly well that Lil had been bred no farther east than the Whitechapel Road. She was a large, healthy-looking blonde with strong teeth and the thick, rather pale skin which stands up well to ageing. She might be in her early forties. It was difficult to tell. She looked exactly as she had when Dalgliesh had first seen her five years earlier. Probably she would look much the same for another five years.
Luker had put on weight since their last meeting. The expensive suit was strained across his shoulders, his neck bulged over the immaculate collar. He had a strong, unpleasant face, the skin so clear and shining that it might have been polished. His eyes were extraordinary. The irises were set exactly in the centre of the whites like small grey pebbles and were so lifeless that they gave the whole face a look of deformity. His hair, strong and black, came down low to a widow’s peak imposing an incongruous touch of femininity to his face. It was cut short all over and shone like dog’s hair, glossy and coarse. He looked like he was. But when he spoke his voice betrayed his origins. It was all there: the small town vicarage, the carefully fostered gentility, the minor public school. He had been able to change much. But he had not been able to alter his voice.
“Ah, Superintendent Dalgliesh. This is very pleasant. I’m afraid we’re booked out this evening but Michael may be able to find you a table. You’re interested in the floor show no doubt.”
“Neither dinner nor the show, thank you. Your food seemed to disagree with the last of my acquaintances who dined here. And I like my women to look like women, not nursing hippopotami. The photographs outside were enough. Where on earth do you pick them up?”
“We don’t. The dear girls recognise that they have, shall we say, natural advantages and come to us. And you mustn’t be censorious, Superintendent. We all have our private sexual fantasies. Just because yours aren’t catered for here doesn’t mean that you don’t enjoy them. Isn’t there a little saying about motes and beams? Remember, I’m a parson’s son as well as you. It seems to have taken us rather differently, though.” He paused as if for a moment interested in their separate reactions, then went on lightly: “The Superintendent and I have a common misfortune, Sid. We both had a parson for a dad. It’s an unhappy start for a boy. If they’re sincere you despise them as a fool; if they’re not you write them off as a hypocrite. Either way, they can’t win.”
Sid, who had been sired by a Cypriot bartender on a mentally subnormal skivvy, nodded in passionate agreement.
Dalgliesh said: “I wanted a word with you and Miss Coombs about Maurice Seton. It isn’t my case so you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. But you know that, of course.”
“That’s right. I don’t have to say a damn word. But then I might be in a helpful, accommodating mood. You can never tell. Try me.”
“You know Digby Seton, don’t you?”
Dalgliesh could have sworn that the question was unexpected. Luker’s dead eyes flickered. He said: “Digby worked here for a few months last year when I lost my pianist. That was after his club failed. I lent him a bit to try and see him over but it was no go. Digby hasn’t quite got what it takes. But he’s not a bad pianist.”
“When was he here last?”
Luker spread his hands and turned to his companions: “He did a week for us in May, didn’t he, when Ricki Carlis took his overdose? We haven’t seen him since.”
Lil said: “He’s been in once or twice, L. J. Not when you were here though.” Luker’s staff always called him by his initials. Dalgliesh wasn’t sure whether the idea was to emphasise the general cosiness of their relationship with him or to make Luker feel like an American tycoon. Lil went on helpfully, “Wasn’t he in with a party in the summer, Sid?”
Sid assumed an expression of lugubrious thought. “Not summer, Lil. More like late spring. Didn’t he come in with Mavis Manning and her crowd after her show folded up in May?”
“That was Ricki, Sid. You’re thinking of Ricki. Digby Seton was never with Mavis.”
They were as well drilled, thought Dalgliesh, as a song-and-dance act.
Luker smiled smoothly: “Why pick on Digby? This isn’t murder and, if it was, Digby’s safe enough. Look at the facts. Digby had a rich brother. Nice for both of them. The brother had a dicky heart which might give out on him any minute. Hard luck on him but again, nice for Digby. And one day it does give out. That’s natural causes, Superintendent, if the expression means anything at all. Admittedly someone drove the body down to Suffolk and
